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In every new city or country it sets up its business, Uber starts by being extremely friendly to the local influencers. How it does this is very simple: it offers free rides to visitors of tech conferences. These are very often people with huge reach on social media like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. I personally experienced the joy of being picked up at the airport by an Audi A8 last year when I was in Berlin for a conference, and I can tell you it's hard to resist tweeting something friendly about the service.

When UberPOP launched in Brussels last month, it offered the first ride to Robin Wauters (more than 30,000 followers on Twitter, formerly a writer at TechCrunch and TheNextWeb, now founder of Tech.eu) and Ramon Suarez (the face of the local Betagroup, a startup community with more than 6000 Brussels based entrepreneurs).

Ding! Everyone in the local scene knows Uber has arrived.

STEP 2. Pick a fight

Whether it is in Austin, New York, Washington, Paris, Berlin or Brussels - in every city, Uber seems to attract aggression.

Is that a coincidence? I think not. In Brussels, it appears that the company had meetings with the local authorities. From the Uber blog, it is clear that the company did not want to enter what they call "the lengthy process of seeking to change existing regulation before launching UberBLACK – a proces unlikely to occur before the May elections."

Not only did they have no plans to apply for a taxi license, they made sure everyone knew about their refusal to apply for it. From the Uber blog:

"27 November 2013 - After indirect and informal discussions about launching uberPOP an email was sent reiterating our desire to enter the Brussels market with this service."

"23 January 2013 - we met with the cabinet and the regulator explicitly announcing our intention to launch uberPOP in Brussels in February." (emphasis mine)

In other words: Uber entered the market looking for a fight with the local authorities. And it alerted the local authorities about this well in advance.

With everyone on high alert, and the attention that follows when influential locals start tweeting about this fabulous new service that is "finally available in Paris/Brussels/Berlin" it doesn't take long before the authorities dash off indignant press releases to the local press about this sneaky company starting operations without the proper licenses.

Which causes the taxi drivers to raise hell and demand that everyone be held to the same standards. In Paris, taxi drivers assaulted an Uber driver last month. In Brussels, the authorities staged the impounding of an Uber "taxi", even going as far as to invite a camera along for the action.

Interestingly, at the current SXWS conference, Uber actually combines its two strategies of being friendly to the tech influencers while picking a fight with the authorities, as evidenced in this TechCrunch story from yesterday: “Austin Police Department Warns SXSW Attendees Not To Use Uber”.